Disk Drive has one bad sector, worth doing anything drastic?

Earlier tonight I got the message saying Windows has detected a hard disk problem and wasn't really sure what to do. I downloaded Eassos PartitionGuru since it seemed like it would give me a detailed description of things and doing a scan informed me that my computer has only one bad sector. Well over 99% of my sectors were "Excellent" a small amount were "Good" but one was labeled "Damaged" with the message "IO Device Timeout." I've seen some places saying to get a new hard drive or wipe this one clean if you have a bunch of bad sectors, but I'm not sure what to do with only one in total.

Also, if I "repaired" this sector, would it wipe my entire hard drive clean? I've seen some say that you should backup data near that sector but I honestly have no clue what data is near this sector whatsoever or how to figure any of that out.

jumanji said:

Normally a bad sector will be remapped to a reserved sector. ( Any hard drive will have a certain % of sectors reserved for replacing the bad sectors.)

If you can see a bad sector that would mean that all the reserved sectors have already been exhausted and no more bad sector will be taken in. It would also mean that you can no longer rely on this HDD.As more and more bad sectors are created, your HDD may become inaccessible and shut off.It can happen anytime.

Now the safest course for you is to check your HDD with Windows Check Disk with the "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors" checked.( If it is your system drive it should be scheduled to run on the next boot, for a boot time run.)



After this if you still see even one bad sector or many bad sectors, forthwith stop using the drive and back up all important data on it. Then run the manufacturer's diagnostic/repair Utility and check its status.

I ran this earlier except I didn't have the first box of "Automatically fix file system errors" checked off. I figured out the amount of bad sectors I had and downloaded the program I mentioned AFTER doing this check. Should I run this with the fix errors box checked?